The new album from Everything But the Girl – Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, who are partners in life as well as in art – arrives almost 25 years after their 10th studio work, Temperamental. On that record, Thorn wrote in her 2013 autobiography Bedsit Disco Queen that she felt as if she had more or less “ended up being guest vocalist on someone else’s album”; she had recorded most of her vocals during late-night sessions after the couple’s twin babies were in bed.
Since then the pair released solo work, Thorn had written several more music-related books and, whenever either of them was interviewed, they had neatly brushed aside any suggestion of re-forming Everything But the Girl. Yet here we are – it seems the kids can now brush their own teeth and put themselves to bed, and while Watt is as bald as a coot and Thorn’s hair is as white as snow, the songs somehow remain the same. This is by no means a bad thing.
Fuse combines elements of Temperamental’s old-school garage house and trip hop, the duo’s love of pop-imbued songs and, inevitably, a worldview that has been shaped by their life experiences over the past quarter of a century. As always, an unbroken thread of melancholia stitches everything together, with Thorn’s voice deeper (and, occasionally, auto-tuned, for no apparent reason other than that she just wanted to experiment), investing the songs with more world-weary edges that reflect life being lived with all of its sporadic upsets and catastrophes.
As such, while there may be a sense of liberation amid the club beats and grooves, there is also a contemplative awareness of things going askew. The contradictory nature of this is apparent in many of the album’s 10 songs. Run a Red Light is written from the point of view of a disillusioned club DJ (“a few more weeks and I can work it, keep it simple, keep the same crowd”), while When You Mess Up offers counsel to wayward adults (“Don’t be so hard on yourself … have a drink, talk too loud, be a fool in the crowd, but forgive yourself”).
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A very welcome return, then? It’s much more than that. Fuse is so good a soundtrack it is as if Thorn and Watt have never been away.
